Major changes occurring in the world are redefining the metrics of excellence for higher education.

This post might well be titled The Many Pathways to
Globalization II. As I thought about
Suzanne Berger’s discussion in How We Compete regarding the need for corporations to
have “excess capacity” –both in terms of production capabilities and research -
in order to respond quickly to future opportunities, I realized I had heard
some of that argument before in a very different, but not unrelated,
context. In 1945, Vannevar Bush in his
enormously influential report Science-The Endless Frontier, made a very
closely related point in arguing for government support of basic university
research.

Noting the critical contributions of science to the war
effort, Bush argued that it was an appropriate role of government to create
“scientific capital” which could improve the economy and enable the country to
better defend itself should another war erupt. Creation of scientific capital encompassed both educating more people,
and supporting high level research. Most
interestingly, Bush believed this scientific capital must not be inspired by
focusing on some societal problem that needed to be solved. Rather its creation should be driven by the
interests and creativity of the researchers themselves. That is, research should be investigator initiated
and driven. Bush defined this
goal-independent, investigator initiated research as “basic”. Thus Bush’s scientific capital is similar on
a broader scale to the excess intellectual capital that Berger suggests was
critical to many of the corporate product innovations of the past decades -- knowledge
created without constraints that it fit an immediate need, “warehoused” for use
in an as-yet unknown circumstance.

"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."Thomas Jefferson

If one looks to the globalization of the corporate world as
giving hints as to possible futures of higher education (I am certainly one of
those), then How We Compete: What Companies Around The World Are Doing To Make
It In Today’s Global Economy by Suzanne Berger is not to be missed. Professor Berger and her colleagues at the MIT Industrial Performance Center set out to study how
individual corporations are actually responding to the pressures of
globalization. Over a five year period, they conducted interviews
at over 500 companies of varying size worldwide. They focused on sectors where underlying
technologies are rapidly and on those where the underlying technologies are
slowly changing. In the former, they
looked at electronics and software, and in the latter, auto and auto parts and
textile and apparel. Their goal was to
let data, rather than theory, drive conclusions about the impacts of
globalization on corporations. That is to say, this book is neither impressionistic nor evangelical, as are many of the other books looking at the effects of globalization, but rather is data driven.

Many contend that the forces of globalization are so huge
and monolithic that all corporations will be forced to respond in a
more-or-less uniform fashion. The
results of this study argue strongly against that view. Indeed, the research team found an enormous
divergence of strategies being used - apparently successfully - to respond to globalization.
Over and over, they found multiple corporations in the same industry and
generally the same geographic location using radically different routes to success. While
they don’t claim to show that this divergence will be maintained into the
future, they find no evidence that suggests that it cannot.

Zakaria begins with the powerful insight that the West, when
it uses the term Ademocracy@ tends to mean a special type of
democracy that is built on Aconstitutional
liberalism@:

AFor
people in the West, democracy means >
liberal democracy=: a
system marked not only by free and fair elections but also by the rule of law,
a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech,
assembly, religion, and property.@

It is not unusual for a Nobel laureate to change
institutions. It is, however, for such a
change to occur because the new institution agrees to set up a $12M initiative
in science education. That is just what
happened recently when Carl Wieman announced that he was moving from the University of Colorado to the University of British Columbia. Wieman was the correcipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize for
creating the first Bose-Einstein condensate, and was named the Carnegie-CASE US
University Professor of the Year in 2004.

Weiman believes that most science education today is
generally not effective- often counterproductive, in fact. At the same time, the world is facing many
critical problems that have a huge technical/scientific component, and the
economic health of an industrialized nation is dependent on a workforce with
high-level technological skills. Thus
significantly improving science education has becomes a high-priority
imperative for Carl.

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